Jonathan Crane and the Spiny Oak Slug
by Twinings
Summary: "Terror has always intrigued me. Even as a boy." Young Jonathan Crane has a formative experience or two.


Written for the Free For All Fic For All at Ask the Squishykins. Prompt: Crane showing emotional weakness to someone/something that can't exploit it. This doesn't fit the prompt as closely as I intended it to, but it still works.

This comes shortly after "Jonathan Crane and the Quiet Childhood Moment."

Trigger warning: bullying

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It had not been a good day at school. The learning part had been okay. They were working on counting, and Jonathan could do that at least as well as anybody else. He'd drawn a picture, too, and Miss Green had called it a fine-looking blackbird. It was supposed to be a butterfly, but the other kids wouldn't let him have any crayons except the black one, so it was kind of hard to tell.

He was really starting to hate those other kids. All the boys said he was a wimp and a weirdo, and they wouldn't let him play any of their games. And all the girls said he ad boy germs. They ran away if he came near them.

All that wouldn't be _so_ bad. Jonathan was used to being by himself. But some of them did mean things to him even when he didn't try to play with them.

Peter was the worst. His house was the next one down from Jonathan's, and there was no getting away from him. He was there first thing in the morning when Jonathan walked down to the bus stop at the end of the long dirt lane, and he was there at the end of the day when Jonathan just wanted to walk home in peace. Sometimes he and his brother even wandered onto the Keeny property to bother Jonathan when he was doing his chores.

And Peter had friends. Lots and lots of friends. He was even friends with girls, even though if Jonathan had boy germs, Peter must have them, too.

When it was time to play on the playground, all the other kids ran around together, kicking a ball or pretending or taking turns on the slide, or just chasing each other and screaming, from fun, not from fear. Jonathan was a fast runner, but most of the other kids were faster, and when he tried to play tag with them they pushed him down in the dirt, so he just spent playtime sitting by himself under a tree. What he really wanted was to swing on the swings, but it wasn't his turn. It was never his turn.

Something was tickly on his wrist. Jonathan looked down and saw there was a caterpillar crawling on him, a little green one with spines on its back. He knew what it was from a book he had read. It was a spiny oak slug. He watched it bunch up and lengthen out as it squirmed its way across his arm. Caterpillars were funny.

"Ew, _gross_!" A shadow fell across him. "What _is_ that?"

Jonathan looked up at Miranda, who usually ignored him and sometimes picked on him, but _never_ did anything nice.

"It's a spiny oak slug." He didn't add, _obviously_.

"Ew, you play with slugs?"

"It's a _caterpillar_."

"Oh…so that things going to turn into a butterfly?"

"No."

Miranda stomped her foot on the ground. "You think you're so smart, Jonathan _Brain_. Well, caterpillars _do_ turn into butterflies. Everybody knows that."

Jonathan Brain? That was really more confusing than insulting. But he couldn't think of a mean nickname to make out of Miranda Menken, so he let it go.

"This one turns into a moth," he said instead.

"That's the same thing."

"No it isn't, you ignorant hussy." He didn't know what a hussy was, but his granny said it a lot, so it must be bad.

"You're a dweeb and you play with bugs!"

"A caterpillar's not a _bug_, it's a _Lepidoptera_."

"Stop making up words!" She reached out to snatch the caterpillar off his wrist.

"Careful," Jonathan warned. "The spines are poison."

"Poison?" Miranda snatched her hand back.

Jonathan started to tell her that the spines hardly hurt at all, and that the poison just might make her itch for a little while. But then he looked at her face, and he thought. He thought about the way she had laughed when he'd gotten stuck in a tree and torn his pants. He thought about the time they'd gone down to the pond and she'd told Peter to push him in. He thought about the time she'd spilled water on him and told everyone he'd wet his pants. And most of all, he thought about the way she _never_ let him raise his hand in class, even though he always knew the right answer, even when nobody else did.

"It's _deadly_ poison," he said with a smirk. "Don't you know anything? You have to be _very_ careful, or the spines will jab right through your skin." Miranda took a small step backward. Jonathan stood up, holding out his hand so she would get a good look at the caterpillar still inching its way across his skin. "At first, it starts to itch. Then the poison gets into your blood, and then it starts to burn. The burning spreads through your whole body until it feels like you're on fire. And when the poison gets to your heart? You _die_." He moved his hand even closer. "Wanna touch it?"

Miranda shrieked and ran away.

Jonathan ran after her. Suddenly, it was not enough that he had found a way to get her to leave him alone. Now she was afraid of him, and he _needed_ her to stay that way.

"It's just a little caterpillar, Miranda!" he taunted as she dodged around the monkey bars.

"I DON'T WANT TO BE POISONED!"

They plowed through a game of duck-duck-goose, sending kindergartners scattering to both sides. Someone—he didn't see who—stuck out a foot and tripped him. He knocked into Miranda, swatting his hand against the side of her face , then hit the ground, hard. His glasses went flying off, and he scraped his cheek and chin on a rock. Surprised tears sprang to his eyes, but before he could cry, Miranda _screamed_.

"I'M POISONED! I DON'T WANT TO DIE!"

She ran off, screaming and clutching her cheek. The others followed after her. Nobody paid any attention to Jonathan.

He put his glasses back on. Then he checked around for the caterpillar, afraid it had been squished.

It hadn't. Good. This was the greatest thing that had ever happened to him, and he could hate to lose the thing that had made it happen.

"You are my best friend," Jonathan declared at he scooped the larva up with the corner of his shirt. He was going to take it home with him, and keep it in a jar in his window, and take care of it, and feed it leaves, and play with it, and he would have his very own pet, and maybe even after it turned into a moth they could still be best friends.

Later that day, Jonathan learned that some people were violently allergic to spiny oak slug caterpillar stings. Miranda ended up in the hospital. He felt bad about it, but not that bad.

He named the caterpillar Fluffy.

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If you follow AskTheSquishykins, you know the whole story of what happens to Fluffy. If not, hooray! Happy ending for Jonathan!


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